Our weekly lunch seminar series featuring internal speakers in the field of ecology and evolutionary biology.

This seminar will be in-person and livestreaming on Zoom (link this page). Contact eebsemaccess@umich.edu for password at least two hours prior to the event.

Abstract
Every organism is confronted with endless amount of challenges during its lifetime. Some of the challenges can be avoided, for others the organism is prepared for (due to evolutionary adaptation), but most of those challenges turn out to be costly to confront. In such cases the focal organism frequently faces a trade-off – necessity to pay for improvement in one trait with deterioration in another trait.

Daphnia is almost constantly found between a rock and a hard place, and yet it is ubiquitous and dominates most of the lakes and ponds. It’s resilience to variety of environmental challenges stems from some impressive adaptations, enormous phenotypic plasticity, and mastery in performing beneficial trade-offs. During the seminar I will present some of the fascinating ways in which Daphnia avoids or mitigates threats like changing climate, parasitism or predation.